


Still Life and Street

by Trojie



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Backstory, Crimes & Criminals, Hacking, M/M, preslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-11
Updated: 2011-03-11
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:25:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is a hacker. One night he finds a stranger in his bathroom who says he has a proposition for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Life and Street

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snottygrrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snottygrrl/gifts).



> \- Arthur/Eames preslash  
> \- Title is from M. C. Escher's woodcut of the same name. Also appearing (unnamed) at the end is the lithograph 'Street in Scanno, Abruzzi'.  
> \- Written for Snottygrrl in return for her donation to help Christchurch after the quake, from the prompt 'catburglar!Eames and high-end-internet-thief!Arthur'. Thank you for your generosity! I hope this is something like what you were looking for.

Arthur is having a fairly ordinary night communing with the espresso machine and doing some coding when there's a thump from the bathroom. He sighs, saves and closes the window he's working in (paranoia is a survival instinct, shut up), and goes to go pick up whatever it is that's fallen off his shitty shelves.

The shelves are fine.

'Ah. Well, this is very awkward.'

'Don't burglars usually turn up when everyone's asleep?’ Arthur asks the masked man who's half-in and half-out of his window. There are other questions he has, such as “this is the second floor, how the hell did you get up here?” but this one seems most pressing.

'It's three am, most people _are_ asleep. This is generally a very good time of the day for burgling.'

'So either you're an opportunist or you're really crappy at research.' Arthur sits down on the toilet lid and regards his visitor with some interest. 'Because I'm practically nocturnal.'

'You're not carrying, are you?' the burglar asks. 'Only this is not the most comfortable way to be sitting, if you follow me, and I'd quite like to just get both legs inside the window so that there's, y'know, bloodflow, without getting shot because you've got an itchy trigger finger.'

'I don't carry inside my own house,' Arthur says, folding his arms. 'And I can control myself when I am, anyway.'

'So I can move without being afraid for my life?' The burglar doesn't look particularly afraid, it must be said. He's grinning, and what he can see of the man's eyes tells Arthur it's real.

'Life, yes. Freedom, no. Give me one good reason I shouldn't call the cops.'

It's barely a bluff. Arthur _isn't_ going to call the cops, but it's what any reasonable person would do, so Mister Cat Burglar isn't going to call him on it.

Except ... 'You have enough good reasons of your own,' says the burglar, smirking. 'You asked if I was an opportunist or if I'd just skipped my research. Would you believe me if I said I knew I was going to find you here tonight?'

'No.'

'Well, I did. I meant to make a better entrance, but such is life. Are you going to invite me in, Arthur? I've got a proposition for you.' And with that, the burglar stands up, unfolding onto Arthur's bathroom floor with feline precision. Arthur gets up at the same time, trying to keep between the man and the door out, which - given the tiny size of the bathroom - puts the burglar straight into Arthur's personal space.

He pulls his mask off, revealing level grey eyes with a hint of mischief in them, and says, 'Or should I call you Pointman?'

Arthur hasn't heard that name said out loud ever before. It's not supposed to be connected to his real name in any way. Hearing the two of them in the space of a breath worries him more than he'd like to admit. 'A proposition, you say,' he says, keeping his voice level, not letting his throat constrict, not letting his heart beat faster like it wants to.

And the burglar has the balls to lick his lips and say, 'Maybe more than one,' and that does kick Arthur's heartbeat up a notch.

'Well. You'd better come through so we can talk about that,' Arthur says.

'You're a hacker,' is what the burglar says, baldly, when Arthur leads him through to the main room and gestures at him to sit on the couch. 'You're a good one. Maybe the best. Certainly the most inventive at little traps for the unwary sysadmin, the best at getting in and out undetected.'

'Pretty words, very flattering,' says Arthur, sinking into his computer chair. 'But here you are in my house, having presumably detected me somehow.'

'Oh, it wasn't easy.' The burglar's smile, Arthur is starting to notice, is very easy, and very genuine, and yet very, very calculated every time it spreads across his face. He knows exactly how he presents himself. He works it. 'But there's a good chance I might be the best at what I do, too.'

'And what exactly is it that you do, Mister Cat Burglar?'

'People,' is the answer, full of double-entendre that Arthur means to ignore. 'A bit of most things, actually, but mainly people. I'm a con-man.'

'My professional interaction with people consists of buying a new bag of coffee beans every couple of days,' Arthur points out. 'Whereas your professional interaction with people, I'm guessing, needs you to have their attention, no computers involved. Unless you've magically discovered a way to hack people's brains, I don't see how we can be of any help to each other.'

'Not in our current fields, no. But imagine, just for a second, that a _new_ field, one we could both exploit, was opening up.'

'And what would this field be, exactly?'

The burglar leans forward. 'Have you heard of “virtual reality”?'

Arthur pauses for a second to give the man a moment to realise what he's just said. When no correction is forthcoming, he says in the driest tone he possesses, ' _The Matrix_ came out ten years ago. And I'm a hacker. This is like asking a dairy farmer if they've heard of cows.'

The burglar grins. 'Well, it's not exactly virtual reality,' he amends himself. And then he fixes Arthur with a gimlet eye and says, 'But tell me, what is it you like about programming?'

Arthur normally wouldn't answer this question. For a start, most people wouldn't understand the answer unless they could code themselves, in which case they wouldn't be asking it. But despite everything his senses are screaming at him about this man who, let's face it, has broken into his house, he feels like his answer wouldn't be wasted, not on this guy.

He fumbles for the right way to give it. 'It's … When you write a piece of code, when you get it perfect, and it runs -- that's what I like. It doesn't matter what it does. It could draw a bar graph of the heights of kids in your eighth grade class, or it could funnel every transaction in a bank into your private account in Geneva.' Arthur shrugs. 'It doesn't matter, as long as it runs. Code is beautiful. It's something you've made out of nothing - like building a world through the computer. If I can think of it, I can make it happen. I like that.'

'And that's worth never seeing another human and living off coffee and pizza?' The burglar isn't being sarcastic. It's a genuine question, one Arthur's been asked a lot, just usually in a very different tone of voice.

'Yeah, it's worth it. Like getting syphilis is worth it if the madness makes you paint a masterpiece, or like losing the love of your life is worth it if you write a great novel about it,' Arthur says, and he hasn't said that ever before.

'And if I said you could have that, and people and money besides? See the sun occasionally? And just … create … and be everything you are now, all that precision for the love of it and that ability to plan, but away from a screen?' The man gets up, and paces to the open window, looking out through the fly-speckled plastic bars of the blinds that Arthur keeps drawn day and night. He looks back at Arthur, a question in his eyes. 'Would you do it?'

'You're a con-man,' Arthur says. 'And a thief. Why should I trust you?'

'You're a thief too,' the burglar points out. 'Aren't we supposed to have honour amongst ourselves?'

'What do you _want_?' Arthur asks. 'Be straight with me here. What do you want?' He gets up and crosses the room to stand by the window with him. 'I don't even know your name, and you come in through my bathroom window, flirt like you're gonna ask me to the prom, and you … what? Want to offer me a job? I'm a hacker. I'm a good hacker, but I'm just a hacker. You sound like you're looking for an artist.'

The burglar looks like he's about to reach out and touch Arthur's cheek, before he checks himself. 'Oh, Arthur,' he says. 'You are an artist. An artist of logic, numbers. Your talents are wasted on breaking into tinpot companies and government departments for spite and small financial gain.' He gestures at the poster- and print-covered walls. 'I look around here, and do you know what I see?'

Arthur looks around. He hasn't really done anything with the decor, such as it is, for a few years. 'Nerd chic?' he tries.

' _Back to the Future_ ,' the burglar says, reading off the posters. ' _The Matrix. Star Trek_. Alternate universes and time travel and the idea that the world you experience isn't necessarily the world as it is. And this.'

There's a print of Escher's _Still Life and Street_ in relative pride of place where Arthur can see it from his desk. He's had it since he was a kid, the only kid in his grade who liked math - it was a prize at school, he remembers.

'I like sci-fi,' Arthur replies. 'So?'

'So what if I told you you could make that? That street, that you can see in your head but could never find in this world, that you could create that?' The burglar's confident, calculated smile is gone - he looks earnest now, really and genuinely, and Arthur startles when he realises they're almost body-to-body, standing close and nearly of a height. Arthur feels like he can almost see that paradoxical street stretching away into infinity in the man's eyes.

Arthur swallows. 'How?' he asks, his throat dry.

'In your dreams,' the burglar breathes, and presses a card into the palm of Arthur's hand. 'Come find me when you want to dream a little bigger,' he adds, and then shoves the blind aside, and jumps out of the window before Arthur can do anything sensible. When Arthur sticks his head out, he sees the man land on an awning one storey down, and then drop down to the street and wander nonchalantly away.

He looks at the card. _Eames_ , it says, and that's all it says, but the picture printed on the back is a section of a lithograph Arthur knows well - a woodcut made by a man who knew reality so well that he could see beyond it. Arthur knows that picture, and so he knows where to find the burglar, Eames.

 _If_ he decides to follow him.

He buys a plane ticket to Italy the next week.


End file.
